Posted
by
timothyon Saturday April 16, 2011 @02:23AM
from the that's-nothing-I-can-crash-anything dept.

dkd903 writes "Today the results of the Default Desktop User Testing for Ubuntu 11.04 was published by Canonical's Rick Spencer. The test was done using 11 participants from different backgrounds to test the new Unity interface that Ubuntu 11.04 will have." Though the Unity interface in the upcoming Ubuntu is a moving target, the bad news from this test is that about half of the testers managed to crash it.

Ubuntu rushes everything out before it's ready; it's impossible for a 6 month release cycle to do anything else. This whole Unity experiment is no surprise to anyone who was using in Ubuntu in 2008, when the at the time barely working PulseAudio was integrated into the "Long-Term Release" 8.04. And by LTS, they mean "supported until the developers are whipped to start working on their next 6 month deadline the week after shipping".

Adjust the release schedule just because of bugs? Never again. Besides, Ubuntu is always in perpetual beta now. I think they're trying to be like Google or something.

For me a stable release implies a focus and quantity of backports into that version that I have never seen Ubuntu do. I'm curious since I wasn't following those two: were the "travesties" (agreed) you mention in LTS 8.04 fixed to your satisfaction at any point? Or were you forced onto a new version for things to work?

Try Zenwalk. Basically Slackware, but with a package manager with dependancy checking. Still uses.tgz packages, though, and you can still install a standard Slackware package. You can also install a Zenwalk package on a Slackware system, too, because it still uses pkgtool as the underlying foundation for the packages.

Bullshit, with kernel programming if you bollocks something up the entire machine can hang and there is very little comparatively in the way of things you can do to debug the thing. Worse yet, given a bad hardware design some hardware makes it possible to brick things.

Um, people do kernel programming in virtual machines. And there's plenty of debugging tools around VMs. I know, I write kernel modules.

Also, kernels can mask interrupts and ensure a function is run "single threaded" (no context-switching out), which dramatically reduces the complexity. Not every function is set up like that, many are thread-safe, but drivers are usually written to be uninterrupted and access private memory, so they don't worry about interaction with other cpus/cores/kthreads.

Both are hard, kernel programming is hard, and the massive multi-threading in window managers is hard.

Not only it the whole interface very touchscreen-phone-ish, the thing has its own tie-in to canonical's new App Store/Android Market/OVI wannabe as well.

Yep, thats the thing that is puzzling me. What the fuck has a touchscreen interface to do on my desktop machine (its default in Natty for some stupid reason)? Its not that the interface is completely awful, it looks like it would fit well enough on a small-screen touch device, but on my large screen desktop with no touch none of the changes make any sense at all, its a downgrade in basically every way and that dock/launcher thing is completely incapable of handling more then a few apps before it gets comple

Personally, I was a KDE hater ever since 4.x, and stuck to Gnome. But the growing move towards idiot-centric interface design as exemplified by Unity, and to an even bigger extent, Gnome 3, seem to show that Gnome is not a viable DE in the future.

That forced me to evaluate the present options, and I admit that I was pleasantly surprised with KDE 4.6 (on Debian, in case it matters). I didn't much like the previous iterations for the simple fact that I couldn't even use them for long enough to make any impres

Frankly Unity has (or had) some promise - I've seen many people move their taskbar or dock to the left hand side of the screen, and they all swear by it. I do this now myself for heavy multitasking.
It is an easier more natural way to switch apps than the universal default of the bottom of the screen.

As someone who spends a lot of time on a linux desktop, unity is pretty awful, it just can't do the obvious functional things that other interfaces can, ignoring stablity, it's just no where near well sorted

OK, you're right, KDE is by far the most useable of the three once you've disabled all the "semantic desktop" and "desktop activities" bullshit. But out of the box, it's just as jarring as the rest for me.

Of course, the mere fact that you can disable shitty features is a rarity these days. What happened to the Linux philosophy of personalization?

So who is now Gnome3's and Unity's target group? Idiots overwhelmed with Windows and OS X? I dont remember that the race for Desktop domination was meant to be a race to the bottom.

Gnome3 & Unity are so unusable for everyday work (from a business point of view), that they do not even seem to be desktop oriented any more at all. They both seem to bet on a (appleized) smartphone & tablet dominated future and want to get there as soon as possible.

The demise of Gnome2 will absolutely KILL desktop linux used in businesses, at least in mine. Deprecating the familiar Gnome2 workflow for no other reason than some visual art designer masturbation reeks of irresponsibility towards existing customers and _will_ have consequences. Leaving Windows and trying Linux on the desktop on a larger scale was a bet not every business was willing to make. Punishing those who did by arbitrarily destroyng familiar desktops environments will no nothing but prove linux skeptics right and linux enthusiasts wrong and seal its fate on business desktops on years to come.

I switched back to Windows. Before I get modded as a troll I have to say I still like Linux on the server and I am serious and not troll baiting. I love all the scripts, apis, and programs that Linux has.

I saw the writing on the wall with Fedora 15 after I left Ubuntu due to the lack of stability and quality software. I left Windows because of beta quality products that were terrible. Linux is less stable in my experience on the desktop with the exception of Gnome 2.8. I saw the writting on the wall again with hardware based html 5 of all the new browsers... with the exception of a lack of Linux support.

My 3 year old laptop running Fedora 13 can not even handle some sites under Linux. Chrome is getting much better but most hardware rendering is still only available on Windows.

Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are terrible. Sun donated millions of dollars of R&D into Gnome and Opendesktop and it is stupid to throw it all away. Why? Menu's work. You may want to reduce the amount of mouse clicks to find things. For some reason Gnome decided to increase the mouse clicks for the same task?? Lets now look at the hassle to simply switch a workspace. Why is that hidden? Infact in Unity why do I have to keep clicking around to see all apps?? Ugh

Compiz with newer widgets with more functionality is where Gnome should have went.

I have virtualbox handy for Windows 7 and will look forward to using it to run Postgresql and some Lamp. For me I now use Windows and I feel like garbage for turning back 10 years of my life but I do not care what people think of as stable 10 years ago or cool. I want something that works. Seriously Firefox4, IE 9, and Chrome scream and you can run all the Unix apps with Virtualbox or a win32 version.

Lets hope gnome 3.2 fixes this and I may just come back but there is no shame of switching to MacOSX or Windows. Today's gui's remind me of poor Netscape's demise of 4.

You call HIM a troll and then follow it up with a mountain of FUD? I fix Windows 6 days a week and haven't seen a non hardware BSOD in YEARS. Viruses? The users install over 90% of them so how can anyone blame Windows for that. Gonna set them up in a walled garden and take away their choices? Having choice means having the ability to be an idiot too you know.

Meanwhile you say they'll have "a thousand times better than Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows."? Can I have some of what you're smoking? It must be some g

I don't see WinXP/2k as fundamentally more or less reliable compared to Linux. In Vista/7 land, I'll grant their graphics driver model affords better automagic recovery from a video driver crash.

Usability wise, I suspect either the bitching and moaning is not reflective of everyone, or Gnome2 will continue and displace Gnome3. KDE3 also has an ongoing port, but ultimately KDE4 has grown into a mostly viable desktop (though it irks me in various ways by default). In Windows land, for a user like me, there

Choice is what I like, Unity is driving me crazy because it seems so locked down (or devoid of anything interesting all together). I agree with the ability to personalise philosophy.

KDE still rocks for me. Activities is a great concept and actually works well. If you dont want it, dont use it no big deal. Like classic menus? Use them. Like a desktop or several "workspaces"? Its your choice (or the distro managers for the default appearance).

Agreed on activities - it took a while for me to get my head around the concept, but at least for me it works very well. Like having virtual desktops within your virtual desktops (insert appropriate "yo dawg" here).

Some of the newer gnome guys and others decided that the linux desktop needed to be standardised if it was going to compete with MS Windows (ignoring that the "start" menu can be offscreen on any side of the screen and other weirdness that can be customised in stock MS Windows). They decided we needed a common desktop environment - CDE if you like - and they were a bunch that had never been exposed to CDE on Solaris to see that almost nobody apart fro

No, they realized (a long time ago) that writing a desktop targeted at people that do care to personalize their desktops in the sense you have in mind is a pointless exercise: they are far too few in the big picture and way too uninteresting.

No, they realized (a long time ago) that writing a desktop targeted at people that do care to personalize their desktops in the sense you have in mind is a pointless exercise: they are far too few in the big picture and way too uninteresting.

Not to mention they all switched to Enlightenment roughly 10 years ago...

And why don't those just use Windows? Hardly any personalisation. Mainstream system. And you cannot even say Linux is cheaper since Windows is preinstalled on most systems anyway. Linux with GNOME or KDE will always be an inferior Windows replacement.

That comment sums the current situation up about as much as I could hope to. Not being able to customize Gnome 2 was fine for me because it worked in a sane way the way I expected it to. Change that without giving me the option to tweak it means I'm going looking for something else - bitching and moaning the whole way:).

As I mentioned in another post, I'm likely going to XFCE after this. I always have used it on minimalist installs anyways.

Actually, recently I have found that there is *a lot* of movement in certain Linux DEs to be *less* configurable than windows.

The two things that really annoyed me were first the non-configurable UI changes in Ubuntu, and then the impossibility to turn off the stupid trash can in XFCE. What annoyed me most about the latter was the "We won't make it configurable to turn it of because every user in the world expects there to be a trash" attitude when the point was discussed in the forums. When even 90% of the

It's a bit of a daft argument to begin with, that programmers (especially linux programmers) shouldn't have to be making.

"We don't expect you'll care about the choice. We arbitrarily believe most people like this, and will most likely continue to prefer it until at least 2050. We're effectively removing the choice by not putting 5 lines of configuration code in to read it as a value instead of hard coding it."

If it's a simple option, especially one of user choice and customization, especially something simp

I don't particularly care about customising stuff. I want to get on with actually using my computer. It took me several days of digging around to get Unity into a state where it was just about usable. The first sticking point was the nauseating drop shadow around the focused window - instant eyestrain! Here's a hint, guys - big blurry things make your eyes think they're not focused properly and they go crazy trying to pull it into focus. The utterly retarded idea of sticking the window buttons on the wrong side, that had to go - why break a convention set with just about every WIMP environment since the dawn of time (or at least bitmapped graphics hardware)?

Okay, so what else was broken? Well, there's no weather applet in Unity. "ZOMG JUST LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW LOL" Yes, great, but I spend a lot of time working in windowless blast-proof machinery rooms and I like to see what I'm missing.

Lastly - and the most important thing - is the stupid sidebar thing. So there's a strip of little indistinguishable squares. If you mouse over them, the title of the app pops up. Are they apps that are open, or apps that can be opened? No way of telling. Double click one. An application launches. Double click it again. Some windows shrink and whirl around the screen, but it doesn't open another instance off the application. Right click? "Add to Favourites..." Okay, so another square appears. Double-click that - shrink, whirl. How the hell do you open more than one instance of the same app? *Middle-click* one of the squares. Oh, okay, so on my laptop, that's pressing both left and righ click at the same time? No, because middle-click chording is disabled by default.

Oh, and if you put a window too close to the strip with the squares, it gets scared and hides. Then you've got to move all your windows to get it back. Yeah, that's a really discoverable interface, guys...

Gnome has been getting more and more like an Apple interface as time goes by, but before v3, you could still customize just about everything. Gnome 3 (and Unity) both have some core features you can't modify or disable.

This is the paradox of choice. As the number of
available options increases, peoples' ability and willingness to make good
decisions generally decreases.

Yet a person's willingness to make decisions is completely orthogonal to whether a system allows choices to be made or not. The Gnome people are taking the
choice paradox much too literally, by having the desktop environment mimic their model of a user's brain.

What's needed is a way to reduce apparent complexity, not actual complexity.
Kind of like

1) Make everything configurable via config files2) Only include a small level of that configuration in the GUI config tools.

Or you could even have a "customization" level slider in the config tools that shows/hides more options based on how deep you want to configure.

Or like Firefox, where some configuration is in the Edit->Preferences menu, but ALL configuration is on the about:config page.Or even like Windows, where you have some configurations that are nowhere visible in the GUI, that you can adjust them by directly editing the registry.

That isn't a "simple" solution. Adding that much configurability adds a lot of complexity to code, and in the end you have something like KDE anyway - a gigantic mess of unnavigable menus and GUIs, all for configuration of every last piece of minutia. If you like that, then just use KDE.

But honestly, anyone looking for personalized, super configurable desktops shouldn't even be using GNOME (which I do) or KDE. They don't exist to serve that purpose. You should install something like Arch Linux, install X, a

I'm waiting for the dust to be blown off windowmaker, and more people to realise that they can write cross platform stuff for GNUstep/OS X.

Windowmaker plus a decent file manager / dock would give Linux a powerful, usable desktop. Unfortunately the past few years I've seen of linux desktop "development" is madly rushing to re-implement whatever useless crap Microsoft has tacked onto the latest version of Windows, or trying to look like Aqua.

The Free NIX desktop used to be BETTER because of innovation that was happening in the free software world. Lately it's just playing catchup, and poorly.

It's not just the desktop. So much F/OSS software is like using the commercial equivalent circa 10 or 15 years ago it's absurd. Makes you wonder if the people who are developing it are not just reinventing the wheel, but the only wheel they could find to reinvent was hacked out of stone.

(FWIW, I'm quite a fan of F/OSS software and I'll happily concede there are F/OSS products out there that are easily equivalent to - if not streets ahead - of commercial equivalents.)

Maybe the developers don't understand K.I.S.S. and "if it's not broken don't fix it". All they needed were refinements and improvements, mainly around appearance as they did look a little ugly in places.

Also, with the accusation that open source tends to copy the interfaces of Windows and OSX I guess they were trying to do something different?

UI design is hard, and it's something seldom taught in a lot of CS courses (or if it is, it's entirely optional). Which means there's no shortage of developers, but developers who can design something you'd actually want to use are pretty thin on the ground.

Look back to the GNOME that shipped with Red Hat 7 through Red Hat 9. It was free of distracting crap. It didn't have anything on the desktop unless you count the panel (taskbar thing) or the solid-color background. Now we get TWO panels, because Mac-oriented and Windows-oriented developers formed a committee, and loads of random shit on a desktop that would be buried under windows if you were actually using the computer.

It happened with Windows too. Never minding the rotten core, Windows 95 was actually at

That's your opinion and your way of working. Mine is partially the opposite: I don't want 'Start'-buttons, I don't want panels, I don't want borders. I want naked full screen stuff. With a bit of tweaking KDE does this for me, and I have yet to find a lighter alternative (which I would prefer!).So I change between (running) applications with a mouse-over-edge, and start new applications and see the time, status, notifications, launchers, on a 2-D 'panel' called 'Dashboard' that I call with a mouse-over-edge

I found Unity netbook from 10.10 to be acceptable after a bit of use, but the upgrade to Natty beta was enough for me to drop it in favour of just going back to Gnome 2. I'm also trying out Gnome 3, and both these 2 as well as KDE all feel like suboptimal blind stabs at some holy grail rather than fast and practical.

I'll grant this: Unity seems to be a OK interface for netbooks and possibly touchpads.

You don't want the full desktop experience on those environments.

You don't really care or want Alt+Tab. You'll likely only be doing a few things at once.

My experience of Unity is it is a useful UI for netbooks. It is a compact UI. Problem is it's inflicted on EVERY desktop regardless of size and doesn't appear to have configurable settings that would make it more tolerable/useful on large desktops. I don't want the single Mac style menu or the dock on the left, or indeed the behaviour it uses to hide itself. All these things should be configurable through a UI. I'm aware there are settings in text files that control these things, but they have to be in the

I have to admit that when I installed Ubuntu 11.04 beta with Unity, I felt the need to repartition my hard drive to make more room for linux and less room for windows. I like the desktop, I like the bar thingie on the left (whatever it's called). I like typing "System" and having it give me an application to click rather than wade through 3 submenus. There have been a few bugs like not being able to select that bar thingie on the left sometimes, and I still don't know what that Ubuntu icon is for or why it turns blue. Also, I'd like not to have to type my password in when I boot into linux - I thought that was why I selected "auto login" as an option.
I truly enjoy this latest version and I'm thinking of keeping it. Just fix the bugs. I'll adjust myself to the layout quickly enough.

What frustrates me about Unity is the same thing that frustrated me about Windows 7. Simple tasks take longer to accomplish. Take opening a terminal, for example. In Maverick I can click Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal, or click on the terminal icon I have on my panel. In Natty I have to either:

1. Right-click on the Applications icon and select "Accessories"2. Click "See all" to expand the list3. Scroll down a list of gigantic icons and find the terminal4. Click on the terminal

The fact that it crashes is not the end of the world. Ubuntu 11.04 is still in beta.
What I don't understand is why Unity has made so many bad UI decisions.

1. the icons are on the left, to conserve vertical space. Ok, but I'm NOT on a netbook. Why not give me the option to move it at the top or at the bottom ?
2. The icons are on the left. Whenever you use content on a screen (in mostt western countries) you start scanning the screen with your eyes from the left to the right. Why do I have to see some brightly colored icons everytime I move to the next line? This never happens if the bar is at the bottom. The eyes focus on the content not on some list of eye-candy icons. Again, why no move it to the RIGHT at least?
3. The window title/window controls fiasco. I don't see why should I perform a specific action to either see the whole title of the window,l the window control buttons or the usual application "File" menu. The desktop is not yet an iPhone. The desktop is still another paradigm. The application menu should be visible at all times! We're not all just using firefox all day long (see Eclipse for exmple.)
4. Blurred windows menus. Why do I have to first focus the window and then hover or something to get it's menu?

PS. Speaking of usability, why does slashdot redirect to it's main page after logging in ???
I still hope unity will change a lot in the next 1-2 years,, otherwise it's just crap they put out to spite gnome.

I installed 11.04 this week, and I totally disagree. I absolutely love top-level navigation taking over horizontal space instead of vertical space, as well as other vertical-space saving features, such as moving the menu onto the title bar. Naturally, I appreciate this more because my laptop has a 12" display. Were I on a 24" desktop LCD and I could spare space for the menus. However, if you are so inclined, this is just a gtk option. It's easy to move menus to their standard location, Unity does not bind you to that decision.

As for readability with icons on the left, just maximize your windows or move them to the left of the screen. It will push the icons away.

Sometimes, I think people criticize ANY change. I'm not involved with Unity and have not accompanied its development. The final result was a total surprise to me this week. I like it. There are corners to be polished, for sure, but it's an excellent first version.

Yes, and the answer is to give people the options to respond to change at the pace that they can cope with. Attract them in with better interfaces, which if they are better will become apparent over time. Releasing "upgrades" to previous versions which take away functionality people are used to and doesn't offer configuration is guaranteed to annoy users. Considering the interface people have huge amounts invested in using a deprecated compatibility option w

> There are corners to be polished, for sure, but it's an excellent first version.

Generally speaking I agree, and that's having used it on a netbook and laptop since they threw it into UNR.

However, the multi-head support is a clusterfuck. I don't know if this is just a Unity thing or something in whatever parts of GNOME it's tied into, but unplugging and switching monitors is routinely a disaster, occasionally leading to having to drop into a console to clean out sessions and configs before I can login t

I hate that the launcher disappears whenever something is maximized. And I hate that the window title and the menu bar occupy the same space and have different functionality on mouse-over. This completely fails the grandpa test: I have no idea how I would ever walk my grandpa through a simple task over the phone when things are constantly shifting, disappearing, and changing depending on where the cursor is. Horrible interface.

1. the icons are on the left, to conserve vertical space. Ok, but I'm NOT on a netbook.

Actually, that also makes sense with the general move to 16:9 monitors (which is also annoying, but using the same size panels as HD TV is clearly going to be an economic end-of-argument). However, most sensible GUIs let you put the icon bar left/right/top/bottom to suit your preferences and monitor configuration.

I have installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The new Unity interface is stupidly shit. Half the stuff literally does not work on my netbook. If you woke up one day and thought:

"Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down phone running an obsolete version of Android through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience"

- this gets you quite a lot of the way there.

If you want it to feel a bit more like a computer, log out, select "Ubuntu Classic" and log back in and then you'll only have the Mac ripoff menu arrangements to contend with.

I actually liked the old UNR interface. I wonder where it all went horribly wrong.

* 18% thought libreoffice calc was a calculator
* 18% thought Ubuntu Software Center was the Recycle Bin
* 36% thought the Me menu icon might be a close button
* 20% could not find a window's menus
* 50% 5/10 first tried clicking Firefox in the launcher again to open a new window
* 54% could not figure out how to change the background picture without right-clicking
* 54% could not figure out how to rearrange icons in the launcher
* 40% could not launch a game that

OK, I jumped on Natty a little while ago, alpha 3 or so. It was a bit bumpy when I got on but within a week all the biggest bugs had been ironed out and it was possible to actually use the system reliably. I went for the new kernel, which includes numerous performance improvements, to the point you can actually notice. My video card, a 1GB DDR3 240GT from Gigabyte, is amazingly well supported these days, which is nice because it wasn't even IN the driver for over a month after I bought it. That was back in

The most surprising part is that this'll ship by the end of the month...

If you subscribed to some of the official mailing lists like I do (server ones mostly because I'm a Sysadmin) then you'd realise how incredibly quickly they work.
These are a busy bunch of people, and most don't even work for Canonical.

You don't need a large sample size to prove a bit of software is buggy. You need a large sample size to prove that it is not that buggy. If all eleven people found no problems and loved it, then you could say that the sample size is too small to be relativly sure aobut the quality of the software.

The only weird thing with OSX is the way it handles application launch and closing, it takes a while to realize that an application with a little arrow under it is still actually running even so no windows are open. The rest of the GUI is pretty standard, just like what you would get on Linux or Windows, just a bit more consistent, better organized (you can actually find what you are searching for without going by tons of useless cruft) and simply better done in general (modal windows for example are so muc

Yeah, sour grapes. It's gotta be (sheesh, didn't see that one coming Einstein).

The truth is that I'm worried at all. It was a rejection, I've had a few before, I'm getting paid a shit load more doing some genuinely cool stuff elsewhere, am getting pissed off with recruiters contacting me out of the blue with shiny new offers, and am truly enjoying my work.

The experience on the team there really doesn't seem much to write home about, not when compared to the UX pros I've known and worked with. I originally t

Yeah, sour grapes. It's gotta be (sheesh, didn't see that one coming Einstein).

Well, when you write "I couldn't even get an interview with them" it sounds like you're really saying "if they won't even interview me, then they surely don't know anything about UX design".

The experience on the team there really doesn't seem much to write home about, not when compared to the UX pros I've known and worked with.

How would you know what the team is like if you didn't even get so far as an interview with them?

Look, I've got nothing against you personally, and I'm not defending Unity. So far I've only seen a few screenshots of Unity, and while I'm curious to try it, I don't really know whether I'll like it or not.I was just taken b

"Well, when you write "I couldn't even get an interview with them" it sounds like you're really saying "if they won't even interview me, then they surely don't know anything about UX design"."
Alternatively (and this was my original belief) I was saying that "I couldn't even get an interview yet Google are happy to fly my to Zurich, I've been working in one of the biggest global agencies for *very* large corporate customers who they're eager to please etc and I'm trusted with tricky projects for them. This